#I did have a little spiral about the status of the printer as a household item

[ginnymoonbeam]

Do the kids these days know about chain letters? Do y'all know that we used to do tag memes, but by mail? There were a ton of different kinds, ranging from "if you pass this on you'll have good luck, if you don't Misfortune will Befall" to primitive pyramid schemes to cute little notes. The basic format was, you get this letter and you copy (by hand, most of this was before printers were a household item) it 2+ times (the letter would specify) and send it to friends of your choosing.

A common variant was a list of like ten names and addresses: in copying the letter, you'd remove the top name on the list then add your own at the bottom. Those usually involved sending something to the top name on the list - a dollar or a trinket, so you'd in theory get a bunch of goodies/cash once the chain filtered through ten more links. That'd be your pyramid scheme variant. But yeah, we'd put our name and address on a piece of mail and send it out there for theoretical hundreds of strangers to see.

My dad had a rant on the evils of chain letters, which was apiece with his overall hatred of anything that involved imposing even the hint of an obligation on anyone else. Thus I have a lifelong complex about tagging people in memes... But that aside, I just think it's neat that we keep doing the same behaviors over and over in different ways as technology changes.

#time marches on #I did have a little spiral about the status of the printer as a household item #and how that tide has come in and gone out again in the course of my lifetime #but it's all good